A good idea can come from anywhere. However, your employees are the ones who are out every day or night doing the jobs needed for your customers. When you make it easy for your employees to provide their suggestions, your company will often have a likelihood of benefiting from their diversity of expertise, experiences and brainpower.
This can be accomplished as easily as by putting up a suggestion box and then letting everyone know you’ll be committed to considering whatever information they believe can improve your organization. You might also want to provide some type of reward for any suggestions that you end up implementing. At the very least, make sure to praise the employee who submitted the idea in front of his or her peers during a company meeting.
When the idea is one that cannot be implemented, discuss the idea with them in a one-on-one situation, where you discuss the idea further (in case you missed something) and then tell them why you don’t believe the proposal is one that will work.
When you announce your suggestion program, consider ‘seeding the pot’ with ideas of the types of info they might want to think about: new services you can provide and/or new, better ways of providing current services; vehicle maintenance ideas; routing or scheduling improvements; ways to utilize work time better, etc.
One of the good reasons to use a suggestion box is some people may not have the courage to approach you directly about an improvement idea they have, but are able to write it down and submit it. Also allow anonymous idea submission. That will increase the likelihood of getting more input.
